How To Make a Pile of Dough with the
Traditional City 3: Single Family Detached in the
Traditional City Style

June 12, 2011

First: I got this nice email.

"Hello Mr. Lewis,

I am a 24 year old graduate of an urban planning program in Canada. In
September I will be beginning my Masters degree in Urban Design at Lund
University, Sweden. Throughout my education I have chewed on the many
facets of urban design/planning and have had plenty of exposure to new
urbanism and its ideals as well as 'suburban hell' (I lived there).
While completing my undergrad every project i worked on i wanted to
infuse with a couple of things,1. no cars, 2. narrow streets. This
undying urge made me feel like I was doing something wrong, like I was
a poor designer who lacked the imagination to design in the North
American context.. but after reading your site I realize how inherent
these desires are in each of us, the traditional city just makes too
much damn sense. Getting to the point i really just wanted to commend
you on a tremendous series of articles that are simple, effective,
clear and unabashedly piss on years of urban thought that quite frankly
sucks. Your writing has inspired me and will definitely have an impact
about how i approach urban design in the future.

Thank you and keep up the good work.

D. B."

So, you see, you can be a champ, like D.B. here, and not a bonehead,
like D.B.'s instructors in school. It's OK. Now that you know you can
do it, why not do it?

Charles Gardner and I have been having a bit of a discussion over at
oldurbanist.blogspot.com about patterns for single family detached
residential areas. "Single family detached residential" ("SFDR") is a
technical
term for what we call, basically, suburbs.

I am rather hesitant to take up this topic, because it is not my goal
at all to build some sort of slightly improved auto-dependent suburb in
Suburban Hell, but to create Traditional Cities instead where a car is
not at all necessary. However, there is a place for this I think.
First, the SFDR pattern is also a valid one for the pedestrian
Traditional City. European examples of Traditional Cities tend to have
a lot of apartments, but Tokyo in fact had very few apartments until
the 20th century. The normal pattern was for very small SFD houses on
very small plots. In fact, the first Western-style apartment building
in Tokyo wasn't built until the 1920s. It was a Western idea they
borrowed. (It was on Omote Sando boulevard, and it was torn down a few
years ago.)

Second, although I promote a Traditional City in which cars are
entirely unnecessary, and that you can walk everywhere or take a train
to another place where you can walk everywhere, nevertheless there is
perhaps a need for a kind of transition format in the U.S. For example,
let's say you lived in the Washington DC area within walking distance
of a train station, that you can take to work in downtown DC. So, you
don't need a car for commuting, but still you need a car to interact
with the rest of the U.S., which is still car dependent.

Thus, can we think of a pattern which is compatible with BOTH today's
need for two to three cars per household, the desire for the SFDR
format, and ALSO compatible with the Traditional City
pedestrian-centric design including of course Really Narrow Streets?
This is a rather touchy design goal, as you can see, since we want to
have one foot in two worlds which have a fundamental incompatibility.

Let's formulate some ideas along these lines:

ONE:
We can start with SFDR
houses, but over time we could transition to denser apartment
buildings, or even mixed-use office/residential/retail format as
necessary. Over time, the buildings can change. However, it is quite
difficult to change street layout and especially street width so that
must be correct from the beginning. Thus, we want to have appropriate
Really Narrow Streets right
from the beginning, which means something
in the 12-30 foot width.

TWO: One of the poisonous
aspects of typical Suburban Hell development is all the Non-Place that
results due to the need to accomodate automobiles. This begins of
course with the mega-wide roadway, and then zillions of places for
parking, and then a big dose of Green Space to make all those roadways
and parking lots a little more tolerable. You end up with a result that
is 50%-90% Non-Place. The
ideal Traditional City is 100% Places,
so
we
will
try
to come as close to that ideal as possible.

THREE: We want to have high
enough density to support some local retail, restaurants and so forth
that you can walk to. This would reduce the need for cars stil further,
because if you can walk to a supermarket, school, pub, bank, local
business and so forth, then you can reduce your driving needs, which
reduces traffic, and maybe even get rid of a car altogether, so that
the family can get by on one car for the occasional out-of-town need.
Likewise, if a commercial establishment is going to be able to get by
without a big parking lot, then it needs to have enough customers
within walking distance to support the establishment.

At this point, it would be typical to then talk talk talk talk for
about a million years, and also perhaps to show about fifty different
examples of things that don't work.
This
is
not
productive,
in my opinion, so I will short-circuit the
whole process by showing an example
that does work, which is the Seijo neighborhood in western
Tokyo. As it turns out (I'll get to this later), I see no reason why
this pattern can't work pretty much unchanged in the U.S.

I chose Seijo because:

a)
I'm familiar with it, having
commuted there for work for a while.b) It was all farmland in 1950,
so it is an example of something contemporary built from a green field,
not a relic from the 17th
century.c) It is mostly SFDR, usually
with parking for one to three cars per house, not dense apartment
buildings without parking.d) It is a wealthy
neighborhood, and considered a desirable place to live.e) It is not in central Tokyo,
but rather quite a ways to the west, so the density is lower and most
families have cars.

Setagaya-ku has a population density of 37,333 people per square mile,
which is quite high, although most of the development is SFDR like
Seijo. This is because a) house plots are rather small, and b) little
of the land area is wasted on roadways, parking, Green Space and other
Non-Place. For comparison, the City of Los Angeles (city not county)
has a population density of 7,544 people per square mile -- which is
considered rather high for Suburban Hell in the U.S. The city of
Cypress, CA, which is in northern Orange County, CA and a typical
1960s-era L.A. automobile suburb, comparable in many ways to Seijo, has
a population density of 7,659 people per square mile. Atlanta, GA has a
population density of 4,019 people per square mile in the city, and 629
people per square mile in the whole metro area. The town of Greenwich,
CT, which is a wealthy suburb to the east of New York City, has a
density of 1,302 people per square mile.

So, we are talking about eight times the density of Atlanta, which is a
poster child for contemporary Suburban Hell.

The City of Paris -- the central area alone, not the surrounding
suburbs -- which has a lot more apartments and not so many SFDR houses,
has a population density of 53,890 people per square mile. The City of
New York (i.e. the five boroughs) has a density of 27, 532 people per
square mile. The borough of Manhattan has a density of 70,951 people
per square mile, and Brooklyn has 36,356 people per square mile. The
City of San Francisco -- just the city itself on the peninsula -- has a
population density of 17,243 people per square mile.

So, as you can see, this mostly-SFDR pattern can achieve rather
impressively high population densities. This includes some denser
portions to the east (more central) part of the district, admittedly,
which might skew the numbers a little high. Unfortunately, I was not
able to get figures for the town of Seijo itself. However, the figure
for the neighboring, even-farther-west (and thus less dense) city of
Chofu is 27,039 people per square mile. Nearby Mitaka is at 27,274 and
Komae is at 31,491. So, the figure for Seijo itself
probably lies somewhere in the neighborhood of 32,000 or so people per
square mile.

Also, this pattern in Seijo is characteristic of SFDR development in
Tokyo as a whole. Very typical stuff.

So, I would say these population densities can definitely support local
walking-based retail and commerce. The figure of a square mile is
important, because if you put a restaurant in the middle of that square
mile, then everyone within that square mile could walk to the
restaurant within fifteen minutes, and mostly less than that. So, if
you have 32,000 people that can walk to your restaurant, then you can
have a viable business without a parking lot. And, since people can
walk to the restaurant, instead of taking a car, maybe they can get by
with one car per family instead of two or three. But, if only 3,200, or
one-tenth as many people can walk there, then you need a parking lot
and you end up with a Suburban Hell strip-mall. And, the family needs
that second or third car.

Here it is: Seijo Gakuen Mae station. "Gakuen Mae" means basically "in
front of the academy," which refers to Seijo University. (Note Komae
just to the west there.)

This is a nice schematic which shows street layouts and building
footprints. You can see that building footprints account for quite a
lot of the overall space, maybe 40-50% or so. Note how the train
station is not surrounded by a wasteland of parking and green space,
but rather is right in the middle of a nice dense commercial
neighborhood. This area near the station is more commercial, so I also
grabbed an area a little ways from the station, which is more
residential.

Here we go. The street layout is a little more swoopy and curvy here,
not so much of a grid. You can see once again the street widths and
building footprints. We aren't wasting much space on roadways and
parking lots here. Lots of Place, not too much Non-Place. Note how you
can walk to the elementary school and high school. No chauffeuring your
kids to school. How does that sound, Mom?

Here is an aerial photo of the same area. The first impression is:
GREEN. Yes, it's very green and verdant -- despite having a population
density well in excess of New York City and San Francisco! This is NOT
"Green Space." Rather, it is a lot of gardens, courtyards, and parks --
the green elements of the Traditional City. It is also a factor of
minimizing the space consumed by roadways and parking lots. How many
parking lots do you see here? Where are the huge six-lane roadways?
None.

Here is an extreme closeup of a portion of the above picture. We can
see the street in the middle. Look how narrow it is. Note that there
are in fact cars parked here and there. This is NOT a no-car area, by
any means. However, look at the traffic on the streets -- almost none!
Look at the typical house plot size. These are small plots. The ratio
of building footprint to total land area (including roadways) is quite
high, maybe around 60%. However, they nevertheless have some nice space
set aside for gardens, patios, yards and so forth. It is very quiet and
pleasant.

Note how much different this is, in terms of greenery, low traffic,
quiet and pleasant, than Brooklyn, which has about the same population
density. That is because Brooklyn is a 19th Century Hypertrophic
pattern with its immense, automobile-stuffed roadway, while Seijo is
more of a Traditional City pattern, with Really Narrow
pedestrian-friendly streets.

Now let's get right down to street level. We can start with some photos
we saw before, back when we were kicking around the New Urbanists.

This is one of those Really Narrow Streets, just like the one visible
in the aerial photo above. It is not a huge Brooklyn street, it is
about 16 feet wide, with about a ten-foot painted lane and two
three-foot "shoulders". Note that there is no separate sidewalk. No
traffic here. You can see in the distance some people walking down the
middle of the street. You can also see those SFDR houses on either side.

Another street. Seijo has lots of trees along the street, which I think
is a nice touch. Look at the SFDR houses on either side.
We have a lot of greenery here but no
Green Space. The land area taken by the trees is almost nil.

Biking down the middle of the street during cherry blossom season.

Cherry blossom season. This is not a park, it is a regular street. The
girl is maybe walking to school, which, as we saw, you can do because
things are close together. Note how she is walking right in the middle
of the street.

Another typical residential street with SFDR houses on either side.
Note the parked cars.

A local commercial street. Note the absence of automobile traffic. Note
the absence of parking. People can walk from their houses to the local
restaurant, pub, bank, pharmacy, post office and so forth.

One of the characteristics of Seijo is no
on-street
parking. Who wants to make their neighborhood into a
machinery-storage lot? Once you introduce a lot of parked cars on the
street, things get ugly quick. For example:

This is a street in central Paris. One of the problems of Paris today
is waaaay tooooo much onstreet parking.
This
street
was
actually designed in the days before cars. It was
designed as a pedestrian street, because everyone was a pedestrian in
those days. It is actually quite narrow, not much wider than our
streets in Seijo. However, it has been converted into an automobile
roadway, with the addition of on-street parking and a segregated
sidewalk for pedestrians. Once you create a separate sidwalk for
people, you in effect designate the center of the street for automobile
use only. Of course, people start to think that they should drive
there. Because, if you make a tennis court, people start to think they
should play tennis there. You can't make a tennis court and then say:
"oh, don't play tennis." That's stupid. If there is one place in the
world where you absolutely, positively do not need a car, it is central
Paris, but, if you build a tennis court, then pretty soon someone wants
to play tennis.

Keep staring at that Paris picture a while longer. Do you want to raise
kids here? Have a family here? Doesn't it feel harsh, bleak and
unforgiving? Does it make you want a bit of greenery, a yard of your
own, to relax and get away from this machinery storage area? It makes me feel that way.

Compare this to a street in Paris that has remained a pedestrian street:

Pretty different, isn't it? Where would you rather have your family,
and raise your kids?

There is not a lot of greenery at street level in Paris, but there is
extensive use of interior courtyards and gardens. Here's an aerial view:

See all those interior courtyards and gardens? If you had a street like
the one above, with no parked cars, and people walking down the middle,
and also an interior courtyard like this, quiet and pleasant, it would
be nice, no?

The width of these two Paris streets is about the same, but the effect
is totally different. That is why, among my three principles of
Traditional City design, one is Really
Narrow
Streets and another is No
Cars. Because, you can have a Really Narrow Street like the top
photo in Paris and still mess it up if you design it for cars, with
onstreet parking and a dedicated auto roadway in the middle. No
onstreet parking or sidewalks, please. If you need more parking for
visitors and so forth, a small dedicated parking lot in the
neighborhood, with perhaps ten slots on per-hour paid basis, is more
than enough.

Now let's look at some Seijo houses. A couple points here: what we are
looking for is successful designs that incorporate off-street
automobile parking,
on a rather small lot. We know it is successful if it looks good and
makes you think "that seems like a nice place to live."

Here is a pretty typical format, two slots of outdoor parking in front
of the house. Note the low wall at the street, and a bit of shrubbery.
In general, I have been against setbacks, but that is in the context of
a denser, more urban format like this:

Toledo, Spain. Retail at street level and apartments above.

See, no setback. Everything is right on the street.

For a residential area, a setback is not
really necessary if the street has no automobile traffic at all, like
this:

Alsatian village. These are single-family attached homes. See how the
entrace opens right on the street. However, this is explicity a no-car
environment. For our example in Seijo, we want an environment where
there are a few cars driving down the street. Obviously, you don't want
to open your door and have a car passing eighteen inches away, so
people generally want a little buffer between them and the street. This
is fine, as long as it doesn't get out of hand. The typical solution in
Seijo is either a setback which doubles as car parking, or a sort of
low wall with a few shrubs. With a low wall and a few shrubs, you can
separate the house from the street traffic nicely even though the
actual distance between the house and the street is maybe four or five
feet -- not much.

A typical low-wall-plus-shrubs approach.

Another wall and shrubs. Look how little space is actually taken by
this method. It accomplishes a lot more "insulation" than having
fifteen feet of open mowed lawn.

Another parking solution, the big blank garage. Note how the garage is
right on the street, with no setback. The disadvantage of a garage is
that it looks rather ugly and industrial. The advantage is that you can
build on top of it, and thus you lose effectively no space at all to
parking. Look how the house is built on top of the garage, and also on
the left there is a garden/patio on top of the garage. Also, the garage
serves as an excellent buffer from the street, replacing the low wall
and shrubs.

Another low wall. This looks like an apartment building. The upper
floors have a balcony and the ground floor apartments have a small yard.

A very typical solution. Here we are using the setback from the street
as outdoor parking. We can fit three cars in here! The advantage of
outdoor parking is that it is a lot less ugly than that steel garage
door. The disadvantage is that you lose some space this way, and you
can't build on top of it. However, the combo setback/parking solution
is a good one.

Another garage, with a patio on top, and a low wall/shrubbery combo
with a sort of entrance courtyard behind.

Another garage and entrance patio. Actually, I don't think this is a
garage, but rather a garage door that opens onto outdoor parking.

A wall enclosing an entrance courtyard/patio/garden. No parking here by
the looks of it. The enclosed garden is much more useful and pleasant
than the exposed "front lawn" of bare mown grass typical of Suburban
Hell.

Outdoor parking.

These are townhouses on very small plots. The plot is barely wide
enough for a single-car-width garage and a small flight of stairs --
maybe 20 feet. The unbroken wall of garages is rather ugly, but if you
have only 20 feet to work with it is not a bad solution. The other
option would have been to have an outdoor parking/setback arrangement,
which would have been less oppressive than this blank garage door. The
advantage here is that the owner gets a nice patio/garden built over
the garage. The other advantage of a plot that is only 20 feet wide is,
of course, that it's a lot cheaper. It's a tradeoff.

This is not in Seijo, but it is in Tokyo. It is a very, very narrow
house. Note the combo setback/parking space in front. Nice, simple,
unobtrusive solution.

Sunken parking under the house. Lots of space taken here by a driveway,
but this also serves as additional parking for visitors. We could park
probably four cars here.

You can barely see it, but there's a car parked on the right. A low
gate is in front of the house.

Typical Seijo street with SFDR houses on either side. Nice, isn't it?

A very American-looking garage without anything built on top of it. The
property owner must be wealthy to waste space like this. The house plot
here is quite large. However, note that the garage is right up against
the street, with no setback or driveway.

Another large house with garage.

Apartment building with outdoor parking.

This is an interesting solution in a modernist style. The car is almost
like a sculpture on presentation. The entrance to the house is up the
stairs on the right.

Outside of a house in a contemporary style.

Lots of greenery here, and an enclosed courtyard/garden. This is a big
house so there is probably some parking somewhere.

Another big house, with a gated garage/parking area on the left. The
vertical gate functions much like a garage door, but it is a lot less
visually oppressive since you can see through it to the interior
courtyard.

A rather large house, with garage on the right and a courtyard/patio
built above.

A modernistic style house. Note that there is no setback -- it is right
on the street, with about 12 inches of bushes to help break up the
blank modernistic walls.

A typical example of the combo setback/parking. There's room to park
three or four cars at this house.

A large estate.

Nice house here with outdoor parking for two or three cars on the left.
Note how the wall separates the parking area, keeping the cars on the
"street" side while the interior garden/patio is separated from the
cars.

A covered setback/parking spot.

Another typical Seijo street with SFDR houses on either side. Remember,
this is at 32,000 people per square mile density. Seems pleasant,
doesn't it? Note the people walking down the middle of the street.

Remember my rule: a street that is dominated by automobiles is a
No-Place. A street that is dominated by humans/pedestrians is a Place.
You can tell if it is a Place because people will feel comfortable
walking down the middle of the street, even if the street can be used
by cars as well. Thus, we see that
Seijo is close to 100% Places.

Could you raise your children here? Live
here as a retiree? Is it a nice place for moms and young women? Is it
quiet and pleasant?

Of course! It's gorgeous!

The next question is: could this work in the U.S.?

I say the answer is yes.
Here's why.

Over the past several years, the New
Urbanist boneheads have convinced some developers to make "rear
alleyways" by which automobiles can access parking in the back of the
house. This is a rather inane solution because we end up with even more
land area used for roadways (the regular front street plus a rear
alleyway, plus all the associated Green Space and setbacks), and we
lose the backyard -- arguably Suburbia's biggest attraction -- for a
freestanding garage. Charles Gardner has been doing a really wonderful
job of cataloging this newfangled stupidity.
http://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2011/06/more-garages-and-alleys.html

A new development in Raleigh, NC.

Note the large front street -- actually a sort of double street with a
barren patch of Green Space in the middle -- and then a "rear alley"
with access to off-street parking in the back. Note the lack of
backyards. Also note the rather high density here. These are not real
big plot sizes, similar to Seijo I'd guess. However, instead of the
Seijo model where 90% of the land area is either building footprint or
gardens/courtyards/patios etc., here we have huge swathes of No-Place
in the form of those colossal roadways and Green Space. While the Sejio
houses make very careful use of limited land area so as to provide both
auto parking and also pleasant courtyards, patios, gardens and so
forth, here the land is completely wasted on barren, open, blank mowed
lawns.

Compare this to one of those Seijo streets. Which would you rather have?
Seijo for me, thanks.

And here's that back alley. Of course this is a total abortion.
However, the important thing is this:

This is all you need to provide auto
access in a suburban development in Raleigh, NC.

What is the width of this street? Is
it about the same as the streets in Seijo?
And what about the automobile traffic? It's
about
the
same as in Seijo too. There are no cars in this photo,
just as there are no cars in the Seijo photos.

So you see, the Seijo model seems to be
perfectly sufficient. Of course, you would have nearby some sort of
"arterial" street, with two lanes of dedicated automobile roadway and
segregated sidewalks. So, you would only have to drive on these Really
Narrow Streets for a half mile or less. However, within that context,
you could make about 80%+ of the streets Really Narrow.

Well, there you go. You can talk about
it for another million years. Or, you can just build something
wonderful, like in Seijo, rather than this catastrophe in Raleigh, or
something that is just tolerably mediocre, like Portland.

Could you do even better than this? I think so. For example, I would
like to see more traditional Japanese architecture, rather than this
imported western-esque stuff.

A traditional Japanese building, located in downtown Tokyo near the
stock exchange. Note the garage on the right. (Actually it is a temple,
not a house, but it could be a house.)

Japan has an astonishing architecture. I'd like to see more of it.

House in Azabu, Tokyo. This is not a western suburb, this is the very
center of the city.